Sing Your Life- my Morrissey play

I can’t even tell you how thrilled I was to be part of this project. Each Morrissey play was set in a bar (just like my Sticky series) and was about Morrissey (who OMG I love so much). This was pretty much the best idea to ever happen in indie theater. I talked to Barbara Jwanouskos about it for the SF Theater Pub blog.

I’m sharing the monologue that went up in the show. The song that inspired me was Morrissey’s Sing Your Life, off the Kill Uncle album, released in 1991.

Sing Your Life

Carver is a guy at a bar. He drinks Irish whiskey. He’s probably in his 30’s.

CARVER
It’s about trying to face who I am, like. It’s about like… trying to really face who I am.
I don’t.
I don’t, I think like.
I don’t want people to know what I think.
I don’t want anyone to know what I really feel.

And I especially don’t, when I’m feeling something, when I’m like in my life feeling something, and forming an opinion, I like really, don’t want anyone to know what those things are.

If I really think about like.

I don’t want anyone to touch me, not at all, like stay the eff back, y’know? Like just Stay the Eff, back.
Like I am closed. I am. Isolated. That’s what I am.

I dream, send myself to a place where I don’t matter, where I am walking in the shadow between two tall buildings. In my perfect place there is no me personally, there is only me that breathes, me that is air.

Do you ever feel that way?
Do you love me?
Do you understand that I am so deeply buried inside my own sublayer of consciousness that I can barely emerge?

I am out here singing my life like the man said and you kids are just like.
I’m standing here talking to you. I’m actually telling you what I think and that scares the living shit out of me.

Who even am I? Right? Like that is real, but then this other segment of self who thinks that they perceive reality more clearly than me is all what kind of stupid question is that because like obviously I’m me, I’m just like also the me who is thinking about the fact that am I me. I’m me plus.

But then it’s like am I going insane? Are these insane person thoughts?

Is there anyone even who cares? I can’t imagine what it would feel like to know that you are loved, to truly know it. The thing about God is that like believers believe because they want to believe that they are truly loved, and like how amazing would it be to not only know that, but to feel it?

I’ve been trying to believe it. I’ve been trying to believe that I am loved. I’ve been closing my eyes as though that love is the sun and turning my face up to feel it. I picture radiant warmth. The kind that starts slow on a warm day and sinks in under. It’s not just your skin that feels it but actually the lightness in your bones.

I was booked in at the Savoy Hotel for three weeks in 2005. I stayed there with my wife and on Christmas Eve we fucked on a balcony that was not higher than our drug fueled minds. She screamed out as the bullets soared past us. We screamed out.
I felt… We felt…. We felt essential. Part of things, y’know, we felt like we were part of life. I want to be part of life.